Tag: Sönke Johnsen

Vision in fishes and crustaceans is a fascinating and understudied area. In past decades, there were far more studies on the visual systems of sea-dwelling creatures, but with the push towards applied or translational research, the number of reports in these species have dropped off, much to our detriment as one never knows where the applications of basic research will pay off.

A recent paper by Dan-Eric Nilsson, Eric J. Warrant, Sönke Johnsen, Roger Hanlon and Nadav Shashar reports on the eyes of some of the most mysterious of creatures, Architeuthis and Mesonychoteuthis, the giant and colossal deep sea squid respectively. We here at Webvision love all things retina and would deeply love to get our hands on the retinas of these creatures to perform CMP and explore them through connectomics, to understand how the retinas are constructed, how they evolved and how different/similar they are to other organisms. For now, we have to satisfy ourselves with interesting papers from colleagues on descriptions of eyes from squid the authors have examined as well as their theories for how the squid use their eyes to track prey and predators by seeing the bioluminescence that follows objects as they transit benthic waters.